“It won’t happen,” said Heming.
“Pray that it doesn’t,” said Darjan. “Get on it. Get in touch with me tomorrow and tell me what progress you’ve made.”
Heming went out hurriedly through the open French doors to the square, where the afternoon light was beginning to tarnish. Darjan looked after him, once more reaching around to the martini glass and beginning to turn it around and around on the white marble. Then his hand clenched slowly around the stem. A moment later there was a sharp crack as the stem of the Dartington crystal, tough as it was, gave way. This being virtual experience, there was no blood.
Elsewhere, however, Darjan thought, in reality, unless Heming gets busy, things will be very different….
2
The monthly regional Net Force Explorers meetings could turn into a real mob scene sometimes, so Catie liked to get to them early when she could. But that evening she was almost foiled in this intention by her mother, who, just as Catie was heading back down to the family room, came edging in through the kicked-open front door with her arms full of shopping bags, and also with several canvas bags full of books hanging from her, so that she looked like some very overworked beast of burden. “Oh, honey, help!” her mom said. “The groceries—!”
Catie hurried down the front hall to her and did her best to relieve her mom of the two heaviest bags, which were just about to fall out of her mother’s arms. “Mom, why can’t you leave stuff in the car and just make another trip?”
“I thought I could manage it,” her mother gasped as they staggered together into the kitchen and dumped everything on the table. Catie shook her head as they straightened up and dusted themselves off. “Supermom,” Catie said in a chiding tone.
“Oh, sweetie, I just hate making two trips, you know how it is….”
“Inefficient,” they said in unison. Catie smiled a slightly rueful smile. Her mother worked at the Library of Congress as an acquisitions librarian, and had spent the first two years of her employment trying to work a reorganization of the basic stacks system through the library’s monolithic bureaucracy. Now, six years later, having been promoted to senior acquisitions librarian in charge of classical literature, she was still at it — for while efficiency was not precisely one of Colleen Murray’s gods, it was at least a minor idol before which she bowed at regular intervals, in the name of making the world in general work better. This being the case, Catie knew she was something of a cross for her mother to bear, for Catie felt in her soul that it was wrong to have a house, or a life, look from minute to minute as if you were expecting to have Architectural Digest come in to do a photo shoot. A little randomness around the edges, a little easygoing clutter here and there, in Catie’s opinion, made things look less artificial, more natural and human. And since they get that way anyhow, in the normal course of things, your nerves don’t get shredded trying to prevent the unavoidable….
Now the table looked more than random enough even for Catie. Books and foodstuffs shared it about evenly, and Catie started divvying them up, paying more attention to the books, with an eye to keeping them safely away from the food. The first few volumes she picked up seemed to be printed in Greek, and another was in a lettering she didn’t recognize. “What’s this?” she said. Its title seemed to say RhOIQEA AFOI–ITUW, except that some of the letters looked wrong: the L was backward, the F had an extra stroke underneath the short one, and the h was hitched up between the P and O like some kind of punctuation mark with delusions of letterhood.
Catie’s mother was loading a couple of gallons of milk into the fridge. She paused to peer around the door. “Oh. That’s the King James Bible translated into Tataviam.”
Catie gave her a look. “Didn’t know you were into science fiction, Mom. Which series are the Tataviam from? Galactic Patrol?”
Her mother laughed as she shut the refrigerator door. “It’s not a created language, honey. It’s native to the Los Angeles area. The Native Americans there had about a hundred languages and dialects. Highest density of languages per square mile in the world, supposedly.”
Catie shook her head and put the book down. She had been about to ask her mother why she’d brought this particular book home, but it occurred to her that listening to the whole answer would probably wind up making her late. Her mom picked up a pile of cans of beans and vegetables from the table, stacking them up carefully in her arms, and took them over to unload them into one of the undercounter cabinets, while Catie went through the other books — mostly works of Greek and Latin classicists like Pliny and Strabo and Martial.
Her mother meanwhile finished with the cans, got herself a glass of water, drank it in a few gulps, and pulled the dishwasher door open. “I’m empty!” said the dishwasher in a tone of ill-disguised triumph.
“Isn’t that super,” Catie’s mother said, putting the glass in and closing the dishwasher again. “Your brother’s finally beginning to get the idea. Perhaps my life has not been in vain.”
Catie smiled gently and said nothing. “Mom,” she said, “anything important you need to tell me before I make myself socially unavailable?”
Her mother looked thoughtful. “Nothing leaps right out at me. What is it tonight? Net Force Explorers meeting?”
“Yeah.”
“Have fun. I’ll take care of the rest of this.” Catie smiled again, a little more broadly. She knew her mother preferred to take care of the groceries herself, so that she wouldn’t have to accuse her daughter of “misshelving.” “Where’s your dad?”
“Incommunicado. In the studio.”
“Painting?”
“That, or plastering,” Catie said. “Hal reported faint scraping noises. But it’s probably just painting, since I forgot the spackle on the way home, and so did Hal.”
Her mother sighed. “Okay. Where’s Hal taken himself, by the way?”
“He may still be on the Net with his post-spatball game show. I didn’t check.”
“Fine. You go do your thing, Catie. I have to look these over and see if we need to order copies for the department.”
“Mom, they shouldn’t make you take your work home,” Catie said, frowning.
Her mother chortled at her. “Honey, it’s not that they make me, it’s that they can’t stop me. You know that. Go on, get out of my hair.”
Catie went down to the family room and shut the door, then settled into the implant chair again, lined up her implant with it, and clenched her jaw to activate it.
Instantly the room vanished, and Catie was sitting in an identical chair surrounded by the spectacular polished pillars, shining staircases, murals and mosaics which filled the gold-brown-and-white “front hall” of the Library of Congress. Her mother used a similar entry to her workspace, as a lot of her colleagues did. They felt a natural pride in having as part of their “turf” one of the most spectacular and ornate buildings in the entire Capitol District, a gem of the Beaux-Arts tradition, more like a palace than a library. Catie, though, simply liked the palatial aspect of it, and the sense of everything in it having been made by people’s hands, not by fabricating machines or computer programs.
She got out of the chair and started up the grand staircase to the gallery that overlooked the main reading room. “Hey, Space!” Catie said as she climbed.